broken; but yet the ocean conquers nevertheless. It overwhelms the armada; it wears the rock; and if the Neptunians are to be believed, it has not only destroyed but made a world!"

This, says Mazzini, "is the very abstract of the law governing the efforts of the true party of progress at the present day." And when Byron had once embarked upon this final venture, all that was visionary about him seemed to vanish. The poet of reverie gave place to the man of action. The hard practical sense that had always been an underlying element in his nature now dominated his thought, and he planned his expedition with all the cool calculation of an old campaigner. He had at last found something to do, something in which he believed with his whole heart, and to do it he gathered together all the energy that was left him. Even the weight of the worldweariness, that had long been upon him, seemed lightened, and, although the Byronic note is not missing from his verses and journals during the last few months of his life, it has lost something of its languor, and no longer seems to claim sympathy for the personal woes of the poet alone. In reading of these last few weeks of his life, we are impressed with the sanity and strength of his purpose, and smile at Carlyle's description of the "sham strong man" who "fights little for any good cause anywhere.” responsive echo is struck within us, not by such carpings as those of Carlyle, but rather by the eloquent words with which Mr. Swinburne closes the earlier and the more temperate of his two essays on Byron:

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"As it is, his work was done at Missolonghi; all of his work for which the fates could spare him time. A little space was allowed him to show at least a heroic purpose, and attest a high design: then, with all things unfinished before him and behind, he fell asleep after many troubles and triumphs. Few can ever have gone wearier to the grave; none with less fear. He had done enough to earn his rest. Forgetful now and set free forever from all faults and foes, he passed through the doorway of no ignoble death out of reach of time, out of sight of love, out of hearing of hatred, beyond the blame of England and the praise of Greece. In the full strength of spirit and of body his destiny overtook him and made an end of all his labours. He had seen and borne and achieved more than most men on record. 'He was a great man, good at many things, and now he has attained this also-to be at rest.'"

Many a poet writes his own best epitaph, and Byron has furnished more fitting words for this purpose than another would be likely to provide. Professor Dowden suggests these lines from "Manfred":

"This should have been a noble creature; he
Hath all the energy which would have made
A goodly frame of glorious elements,
Had they been wisely mingled; as it is

It is an awful chaos—light and darkness,

And mind and dust, and passions and pure thoughts
Mix'd, and contending without end or order,"

But even more fitting than these words, in view of the cause for which Byron gave his life, are those of Israel Bertuccio in "Marino Faliero":

"They never fail who die

In a great cause; the block may soak their gore;
Their heads may sodden in the sun; their limbs
Be strung to city gates and castle walls-

But still their spirit walks abroad. Though years
Elapse, and others share as dark a doom,

They but augment the deep and sweeping thoughts
Which overpower all others, and conduct

The world at last to freedom."

Let our final memory of Byron remain, then, the memory of those "deep and sweeping thoughts" which flowed from his personality into the intellectual current of the nineteenth century, and moved the European world as it had never before been moved by any English poet.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

IN discussing the English poets of the first half of the century, it has seemed best, on the whole, to take them up in the order suggested by the dates of their death rather than of their birth. In the cases of all except Landor, this order of treatment has the disadvantage of taking us further back into the eighteenth century with each of the poets considered, although each of them at the same time carries us further on into the nineteenth century. When we set the dates of the five poets side by side for purposes of comparison, the interesting fact appears that the youngest born of them was the first to die, and that, taken in this order, each poet's span of life overlaps at both ends that of the one previously considered. Thus the eighty years of Wordsworth embrace the sixty-two of Coleridge, the sixtytwo of Coleridge embrace the thirty-six of Byron, the thirty-six of Byron embrace the thirty of Shelley, and the thirty of Shelley embrace the twenty-six of Keats. This singular "telescoping" of the respective periods fails only when we come to Landor, who was five years the junor of Wordsworth, and who outlived him by fourteen. Since the attitude of these poets toward the revolutionary movement in politics,

the rationalising movement in thought, and the romantic movement in literature, is the chief subject of the present chapters, we are compelled to work backward as well as forward in summing up their relations to this threefold development. With Byron, Shelley, and Keats, whom we have already considered, this makes very little difference, for they were nearly enough of the same age to be for all practical purposes contemporaries. They all reached manhood when the Revolution had become a memory, when the reactionary spirit had seemed to triumph, and it was their function, or at least the function of two of them, to revive the fading embers, and to prove that the Revolution in its wider meaning had only just begun. With Coleridge and Wordsworth, to whom attention is next invited, the case is different. Coleridge was seventeen and Wordsworth was nineteen when the Day of the Republic dawned for France, and inaugurated the new era of European thought. In other words, they were at precisely the most impressionable age when the stirring events of 1789 made their appeal to all ardent spirits throughout the world, vitalising the thought and action of a generation that had seemed to be sunk in sluggishness. Just then Coleridge was still a "charity boy" at Christ's Hospital. He went to Cambridge two years later, and, although our knowledge of his university career is meagre, it includes abundant evidence that he was in hearty sympathy with the revolutionary movement. One of his friends tells